inFamous Second Son's Particle Effects Compile Directly On PS4's GPU, Does Not Involve CPU At All

"Before we jump into inFamous Second Son, let’s us go a few months back. Back in June we reported that PlayStation 4′s GPU features significant customization and will be able to handle complex asynchronous compute operations some of which were originally meant for the CPU."

Never get tired of seeing that, i thought that was like a pre-made cutscene when i first saw it but it really is completely in-game. Can someone explain why it's better that those effects run on the GPU instead of the CPU? Im not the best when it comes to technical details like that.

if the GPU can handle calculations and computations related to the graphics side of the game, then the CPU cores can be freed up for other applications. Ultimately it will boost performance resulting in better framerates and allowing for more complex scenarios.

The GPU is sooo much more powerful then the CPU. Especially in the next gen consoles they are both using 8core jaguar which is basically2 tablet CPUs taped together. Since there is a lot of smaller calculations happening at the same time it takes less strain for the GPU to run it because it's so much more powerful then the CPU is.

You could run a game like Second Son on PC at 4k at 60FPS but it would take an extremely powerful system to do so which means a computer that costs over 2k to build. I know some people have super gaming PCs but the majority Dont have computers that expensive.

Yeah Panda, I was hoping that the next range of consoles would have the ability to offload the computing power to the GPU. It started showing up on the PS3 somewhat with the RSX / CELL combo, but I knew it really wouldn't start picking up steam until the XOne / PS4.

We should all be thankful Sony had gamers in mind with the PS4. Shoddy PC ports should hopefully be a thing of the past now that the consoles also use X86.

Not necessarily resulting in bad AI. It still depends on a couple of things. Since they are multicore some developers engines run better on less cores that are more powerful. For example SOE admitted that there engine for Planetside 2 ran better on Nvidias gaming rigs because it isn't made for multithreads. Just so I don't confuse you think 1 core runs 1 thread. So for the PS4 since it has 8 cores they will use 8 threads. http://www.playstationlifes...

Then since stuff like particles running off of the GPU there is more room on the CPU that they haven't used so there is more power that the CPU has that it didn't have before. So having more stuff like particles running on the GPU can mean they can make the AI more advanced if they wish. Lets just say 500MB a second is used to make the particles react realistically and the CPU can handle 1GB a second of data. If the particles where run on the CPU they would have 500MB a second left for the AI. But since the GPU runs the particles there is the full 1GB a second for the AI.

Everything depends on how the devs want to program the game really. No devs AI will turn out the same. Kinda hard to say how AI is going to be this gen. Only the devs do really.

To sum it up the AI depends on: How good the developers engine is at spreading threads over cores how advanced the dev wants to make the AI how much stuff they offload to the gpu to leave room to work on stuff on the GPU

Well, I hope it improves this gen because AI in games has barely improved, and while graphics are nice they keep putting all the horsepower into shiny graphics and sacrificing AI, look at Ryse and Killzone, more of the same with pretty textures.

On a related note, I wonder if they are afraid to make better AI in FPS shooters because if it's good enough it could hurt multiplayer.

shouldn't all that stuff be done on the cpu so they can use the rest of the gpu to enhance the graphics? on ps3 they used the cell cpu to make graphics better, now tasks usually reserved for cpu are done on the ps4 gpu. I am worried that it is a bad sign and that the cpu isn't that powerful.

The PS4s CPU is AMDs Jaguar. Usually the Jaguar comes in 4 cores so double cores means they have double the performance. The other question is how good the developers engine is at multithreading. Because 1 thread per core means they can have 8 threads to use but some developers engines are better at running on less cores but are a lot stronger.

But offloading the particles to the GPU means they can use the CPU for different tasks. Imagine the CPU running the particles and then the CPU can handle 3 different enemy types on screen at once. Then if they offload the particles from the CPU to the GPU they could run say 6 or 7 different enemy types at once because of the extra power.

Even back in February at the initial reveal they showed the 1 million object drop running on a fraction of the GPU.

All in all it's up to the developers to balance out the graphics, AI and frame rate.